Berkeley, California
We live in a world where many aspects of the dystopias alluded to in films like Bladerunner or RoboCop have been realized. Not only do robots take the form of labor-saving devices (and AI-driven weapons of mass destruction), but many of us, like cyborgs, have near-miraculous inventions embedded within or attached to our bodies. Prosthetic devices substitute for hips or knees, metal plates are implanted in the skull or jaw, and external orthoses support broken bones.
Sculptor Berenice Olmedo rejects the idea that such aids are merely assistive or corrective. Instead, she sees them as part of a human body that is itself constantly in a process of reinvention, mediated both internally and externally: “Walking upright is a technology, writing and speaking are also technologies.” Using what she describes as discarded devices intended for replacement, correction, and support as a primary material, Olmedo constructs hauntingly beautiful, defiantly non-normative figurative sculptures.
“To ti ên einai,” her first museum exhibition in the U.S. (on view through November 23, 2025), features six of these hybrid bodies. Olmedo denies the tyranny of an “anthropomorphic hierarchy” that privileges the white, male, heteronormative body, asserting that standardized visions and expectations need to be reconsidered. Of the four freestanding figures included here, for example, three are armless, while the fourth consists of little more than a single massive arm, topped with a cryptic mass that registers as a head or, possibly, a fragment of torso—all balanced on the outspread fingers and thumb of the single hand.
Tinted resin predominates in all six works, mostly as forms cast from braces or splints created to support, correct, or improve some musculoskeletal function. These elements are pieced together with the same type of prosthetic hardware used to install devices within the body: femur nails, cortical screws, and socket adaptors. The translucence of all but one of Olmedo’s sculptures reveals the variety of embedded metal elements, requiring the viewer to consider inside and outside simultaneously in a way that figurative works rarely demand. In the eight-foot-tall Rutilio (2024), a cheerful orange resin gives the suggestion of balloon-like weightlessness, as the body’s mass balancing atop gracefully turned-out legs tinted a smoky blue from the knee down.
Like the other standing works, Rutilio seems to be held in place only by its massive cast-lead feet, their fantastically thick soles and irregular shapes evoking the kind of corrective shoes worn to compensate for twisted or shortened limbs. These cast forms seem to be a recent innovation, replacing the circular lead plates to which earlier figures were attached. Like magic, they balance each figure’s complicated suggestion of motion: Casilda’s slight tilt, as if listening for a whispered cue; Cipriano’s bold step forward, like Rodin’s St. John the Baptist; and Rutilio’s startling invocation of a Degas ballet dancer.
Two wall-hung pieces allude to disembodied arms while also suggesting a kind of physical realization of language. Each work consists of a series of near-calligraphic gestures realized with cast resin, into which Olmedo has embedded prosthetic parts—rods, joints, and socket adaptors, as well as what is described in the materials list as “surgical steel traumatology instruments.” These are the clamps, nails, awls, drill bits, and mallets used to insert such devices into flesh. It isn’t easy to distinguish prosthesis from tool, especially for the uninitiated, but the overall effect is eerily graceful rather than brutal—like a word in a language spoken by many but rarely understood by those outside of the group of its users. In Sicarú (2024), sharply bent elbows, a shoulder, and several claw-like appendages are joined together by various devices, evoking a slanting cursive. In contrast, the metal and cast-resin elements in Zeltzin (2025) are separate, hovering near each other without touching, like a handful of printed letters.
Olmedo has confronted standardized expectations of the body throughout her career, investigating the potential for aiding devices, whether external or internal, in order to expand those standards or even move beyond them. She rejects the idea of “perfection,” describing instead a world in which the ideal includes every body. Questioning the ableism implicit in every aspect of art and life, Olmedo makes us look at what lies beneath, attracting our gaze, even as she redefines the idea of beauty.
